People ask “What is self-love?” and often what they mean is: Why does being me feel so hard? Why can’t I rest? Why do I keep bracing against my own inner life?
From a non-dual lens, “self-love” can sound like a strange phrase—because if the experience is truly non-dual and intimate, love is already woven into it.
And still, there’s another doorway that doesn’t require adopting a belief or repeating a mantra. It starts with something simpler than self-improvement: a quiet, precise quality of attention.
The speaker points to a practice where attention touches sensation gently—without force, without fixing—and where that simple curiosity, over time, begins to feel like love.
Why “Self-Love” Can Sound Strange in Non-Dual Language
What is self-love?
I can’t tell you the exact definition by everybody’s standard, and the way I’m going to talk about it may not sound like self-love necessarily.
Over the years I’ve wrestled with this a little bit—not in myself actually, but with people asking, “What is self-love?” or “I don’t feel like I love myself. How do I love myself?”
From a non-dual standpoint, it’s kind of a non-sequitur. It doesn’t really make sense. It’s either non-dualistic or it’s not.
If realization is non-dual and remains non-dual—meaning we don’t dissociate over and over or get caught up in thoughts and daydreams—then the experience itself is rather intimate. It’s clear. It’s intimate. It’s full.
And it does feel infused with love.
So to me, that’s one answer of what self-love is—through the lens of insight, the lens of awakening, the lens of non-duality where there is no sense of separation anymore.
That sense of separation is replaced by a pervasive experience of intimacy, interconnectedness, just this. It’s full. It’s complete in its own experience.
Another Doorway: Self-Love Through the Body, Shadow, and Trauma Channel
Another answer came to me though.
There’s also a kind of approach to self-love through the trauma channel, through the shadow channel—maybe even the shamanic channel.
I can’t give you a definition or a litmus test for it. I can only point to it.
And from here on, you kind of have to explore it in your own experience. Follow it into your experience, or it will become conceptual, which is not what I’m talking about.
The First Movement: One Moment of Introspection
The first movement, the first approach, is a moment of introspection:
What is it I’m feeling right now?
What is being experienced in this body?
What is appearing? What is felt? What is most alive?
It can be anything.
It could be sensation in the hands or feet. Tension in the face.
A spot that feels like a subject behind the eyes, behind the head.
Openness in the chest, warmth, fullness.
A sense of presence in the gut—in the center of the body, in the core.
It could be energetic signatures throughout the body.
Whatever we touch into and recognize: okay, that’s here.
That’s physical presence. The body sense appearing with its own signature—without interpretation.
Start there.
Just noticing.
And let that noticing follow the contours of experience.
Let it follow the contours even of resistance, if resistance appears.
Curiosity Without Force
The noticing itself—the contact through noticing, through attention—becomes a kind of curiosity.
It is already curiosity.
And what helps it remain curiosity is that we’re not using force.
We’re not trying to push anything away. We’re not trying to pull anything closer or grasp anything.
We’re also not trying to fix or heal anything.
It’s as if attention landed on sensation as gently as a feather lands on a table.
As gently as a bee lands on a flower.
That kind of attention: just landing, touching in, feeling into whatever sensation is appearing.
And this is dynamic. Being in a body is dynamic. Being alive is dynamic.
So you follow the contours with attention such that attention can move with the sensation.
It can move into the sensation. It can move through the sensation.
It can change and morph as sensation changes and morphs throughout the body.
Like a bee moving from one flower to another, one petal to another—gently touching. Not taking the flower away. Not attacking it. Not trying to make it not be there.
Or like a feather blowing along the course of the ground—over rocks, soil—touching where it touches, not judging.
Attention can do this exact thing.
This is interest, attention, curiosity—natural curiosity.
Curiosity in this way is non-judging and non-labeling. Pure curiosity.
Shikantaza-Like: Natural Meditation in the Body Sense
As you practice, this can feel like natural meditation.
If you know shikantaza or natural meditation, it feels similar, except attention remains in the body sense instead of moving to any sense field.
With attention in the body sense, you let it move where it wants to move and permeate what it permeates.
Not judging: enough or not enough.
That alone is huge.
Because a lot of times we go in and say:
“I feel something, but it’s not enough.”
“I’m not getting it right.”
“It’s not as much as before.”
“It’s not as much as he said or she said it could be.”
Notice those thoughts appearing. That’s attention moving up into the head, into consciousness. That’s fine.
Then as you come back into the body, notice attention can find sensation fields again—contours of feeling—regardless of what they are.
Not judging at all.
Not saying: “I want it to be loose versus tight, relaxed versus contracted.”
Even pain.
This attention is just touching in—touching in—touching in, like a bee.
Not saying: “I want this kind of nectar.”
Just touching in wherever it touches in, totally naturally.
When Curiosity Starts to Feel Like Love
As this curiosity remains, it starts to feel like love.
Maybe like enjoyment at first, but he wants to remove enjoyment because it doesn’t have to be enjoyable for love to arrive.
What makes the signature of love materialize in his experience is not enjoyment so much as equanimity.
Curiosity without agenda.
But don’t make love a goal either. It’s the fruition of this practice, the fruition of this exploration.
And trust that even if love doesn’t show up, it’s okay. The exploration itself feels natural. You’ll feel how natural it is.
That’s why he uses these natural metaphors—the bee and the feather—because it is a natural experience.
And he says: it will right so many wrongs. It will settle so much if you give it time and practice and keep at it.
He says it will do so much shadow work. It will do so much equanimity work and reactivity work.
It will help integrate awakening better than constantly trying to be pure awareness or something.
So practice it. Work with it. Follow the pointers so it doesn’t become something habituated—which is what often happens in these spaces.